his rush-thatch on the lake-side, he
tortured himself with one question: Why had she--Zosephine--reached
away out from Carancro to buy the uncultivable and primeval wilderness
round about his lonely hiding-place? Hour after hour the inexplicable
problem seemed to draw near and nearer to him, a widening, tightening,
dreamlike terror, that, as it came, silently pointed its finger of
death at him. He was glad enough to leave his cabin next day in his
small, swift pirogue--shot-gun, axe, and rifle his only
companions--for Terrebonne.

It chanced to be noon of the day following, when he glided up the
sunny Terrebonne towards the parish seat. The shores of the stream
have many beauties, but the Acadian's eyes were alert to any thing but
them. The deep green, waxen-leaved casino hedges; the hedges of
Cherokee rose, and sometimes of rose and casino mingled; the fields of
corn and sugar-cane; the quaint, railed, floating bridges lying across
the lazy bayou; the orange-groves of aged, giant trees, their dark
green boughs grown all to a tangle with well-nigh the density of a
hedge, and their venerable trunks hairy with green-gray lichens; the
orange-trees again in the door-yards, with neat pirogues set upon
racks under their deep shade; the indescribable floods of sunlight and
caverns of shadow; the clear, brown depths beneath his own canoe; or,
at the bottom, the dark, waving, green-brown tresses of
water-weeds,--these were naught to him.

But the human presence was much; and once, when just ahead of him he
espied a young, sunbonneted woman crouching in the pouring sunshine
beyond the sod of the bayou's bank, itself but a few inches above the
level of the stream, on a little pier of one plank pushed out among
the flags and reeds, pounding her washing with a wooden paddle, he
stopped the dip of his canoe-paddle, and gazed with growing
trepidation and slackening speed. At the outer end of the plank, the
habitual dip of the bucket had driven aside the water-lilies, and made
a round, glassy space that reflected all but perfectly to him her
busy, young, downcast visage.

"How like"--Just then she lifted her head. He started as though his
boat had struck a snag. How like--how terribly like to that young
Zosephine whose ill-concealed scorn he had so often felt in days--in
years--long gone, at Carancro! This was not, and could not be, the
same--lacked half the necessary years; and yet, in the joy of his
relief, he answered her bow w